November 22, 2010

"Building Trust: Neuroeconomist Wants to Know How It’s Done"

For Mason neuroeconomist Kevin McCabe, economics is a matter of trust. Trust, or what he sometimes calls the trust paradigm, has been at the root of his economic experiments for the last decade.

Director of the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics, McCabe came to Mason in 2001 from the University of Arizona as part of Nobel laureate Vernon Smith’s research group.

It was at Arizona that the first trust experiments and the idea of neuroeconomics began.

“We were looking at individual behavior and realized there wasn’t a really good [scientific] model for it,” he says. Research led McCabe and his colleagues to the fields of evolutionary and cognitive psychology, then, finally, to cognitive and social neuroscience.

“In exploring, we realized that there was this whole new field that was just starting to get at the biological foundations of human cognition,” says McCabe, who holds a joint appointment with the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and the School of Law.

“It became obvious that, if we were going to build a scientific model of the economic behavior of individuals, it would need to be based on the same biological model that neuroscientists were exploring.”